Strengthening the Roots Convergence and Community Seed Summit: February 22-24

Join us for a weekend-long student organized event that brings together students, community members, seed savers, gardeners, farmers, and food justice activists to share skills and resources while building face to face relationships with one another.

The summit will:

1. Connect participant stakeholders with community based initiatives to help build a resilient and bioregional food system.
2. Ground participants with the story of seeds and how they are at the crux of cultivating a sustainable agricultural system.
3. Be interactive and fun, thereby acknowledging all participants as teachers and learners. 

Events include:

• Speaker Panel on Saturday, February 23 from 7-10 PM - including Dr. Vandana Shiva 
• Seed and Culture Exchange - Saturday, February 23 from 5-6:45 PM 
• A series of interactive workshops in seed saving/stewardship, creating local seed library and cooperative networks, creating and managing student-gardens/farms, building beginner farmer programs, and developing fair trade systems. 
• Open spaces for dialogue allowing for participants to actively facilitate discussions and take action on meaningful topics.

Click here to register for the Summit. For more information and general inquiries please email the organizers.

University Forum for Sustainability Education: February 13

The goal of the University Forum for Sustainable Education  is to create a space to discuss creative ways to incorporate sustainability education into UCSC. We will ask participants to discuss how students, staff and faculty can work together to integrate multiple fields of study into sustainability education through incorporating current curricular and co-curricular programs as well as peer to peer education models. The University Forum will include an interactive discussion led by various student sustainability leaders, a speaker panel consisting of involved faculty and staff and free locally sourced vegetarian dinner. The ideas generated for this forum will be incorporated into the student created 2013-2014 Blueprint for a Sustainable Campus, which is compiled by the Student Environmental Center after the annual Earth Summit event.

This event is being hosted by Education for Sustainable Living Program and will take place in Kresge Town Hall on February 13, from 5:30-8:30 PM. Please RSVP here.

Inter-Organizational Sustainability Retreat 2013 a Success!

The first weekend of the quarter, eighty students and staff convened for the 3rd Annual Sustainability Inter-Organizational retreat for a weekend of community and leadership development, workshops and a whole lot of fun! The theme for the weekend was Community, and by the end of the weekend, the community of sustainability students and staff had certainly been strengthened through a jam-packed couple of days of activities.

Read about the sustainable ways in which we got all those people to the retreat center here!

The weekend began with an opening ceremony led by Tim Galarneau, Research Educator for the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. He had us thinking about food memories, getting our senses fully engaged with fruits and vegetables, and performing spoken word mad libs about avocados and apples. It was a fun and engaging way to open the weekend.

Cammie Yarros and Andrew Plebanek of the Student Environmental Center talk about food memories during Friday's opening ceremony.

On Saturday morning, student leaders from many of the sustainability organizations at the retreat facilitated team building activities with the guidance and support of Miranda Allen-Brower, Director of the UCSC Experiential Leadership Program. Teams of students and staff participated in team building games, experiencing what it's like to work together to achieve goals and problem solve. At the end of the morning's team building games, each team performed a skit that represented what they had learned through the various stations.

On Saturday morning, participants walked around and said hi to as many other participants as possible in a game called "Speed Greet."

After lunch, participants attended workshops throughout the retreat center. Topics included workflow management, best practices for tabling, energy auditing, campus funding bodies, a waste relay, social media, cap and trade, a LEED tour of the camp, and non-violent communication. The workshops provided students and some staff an opportunity to share skills and knowledge with other students and in some cases generate discussion about best practices.

Crystal Owings and Victoria Salas who work with the Food Systems Working Group and UCSC Dining led a workshop on best practices for tabling.

Following the second round of workshops, participants spent some time with their independent organizations, visioning and planning for the coming quarter. For some groups, this was a chance to reconnect with the mission and values of their organization. Knowing one's unique role in a community is important in building connections with others. Other groups used this time for planning for the quarter or having discussions as an organization.

Casey Wing and other students who work on waste reduction through Green Office Certification and Zero Waste in the Sustainability Office led a discussion about how to reduce waste and sort recycling properly.

In the evening after dinner, students and staff participated in a world cafe on the topic of Organization Cultural Awareness and Best Practices, sharing different processes and best practices from each organization. A conversation blossomed from this activity that led to ideas for how to find more ways to come together inter-organizationally more often, and students seemed invigorated with a drive for more collaboration.

Saturday's activities closed with an hour-long campfire and open mic night, during which students sang, played music, spoke poetry, hula-hooped, and more. It was a fun way to end a long day of activities and getting to know one another.

Sunday morning, organizations had more independent time for planning, and then the eighty participants gathered on the steps of the lodge for a group photo. The retreat officially was brought to a close with a closing ceremony in which each participant taped a piece of paper on his or her back and others wrote to them about inspiring moments or memories from the weekend related to that individual. It was a creative and personal way to share gratitude and feel part of a community after a full weekend of community building.

During the closing ceremony, students and staff wrote gratitude and appreciation on the backs of other participants. Wearing the orange scarf is recently hired UCSC Sustainability Director Lacey Raak. 

Thank you to everyone who participated in the planning of this fantastic retreat, and thank you to all of the attendees! You made the retreat what it was, and our office looks forward to collaborating with you and continuing to foster the relationships that began or were nourished during the weekend of time together. Let's all have a productive, sustainable, and fun quarter!

Click here to view the Facebook photo album from the weekend!

June 2012 Sustainability Profile: Stevenson RA Class & Sustainability in the Dorms

Article by Melissa Ott

If you ever lived in a college dorm, was sustainability a topic your residential advisor often brought up? Most likely not, unless you lived in a sustainability themed house or had a particularly environmentally minded RA. Fortunately, this is changing here at UCSC, and has been in the process of changing for some time. Already, there are signs in most dorm bathrooms reminding residents to turn off the sink when brushing their teeth or to take shorter showers. Stickers are great, but what about the conversations that need to go along with them? RAs present the ideal candidate for starting those conversations in the dorm communities to create lasting change in students' consciousness and behavior regarding sustainable issues.

We spoke with Stevenson RA Sarah Cohen earlier this quarter about the RA class that she’s teaching with two other RAs; one of the topics of the course is sustainability, and we were interested in learning more about the role sustainability is playing in RA training and dorm life. All students who will be RAs in Stevenson College next year are in this class, which discusses other topics such as health and wellness, diversity and social justice, leadership, and which works to create a bond among this team of leaders in the Stevenson community.

Sustainability is part of the curriculum for the course for a couple of reasons. One of the Stevenson dorm buildings, Casa Segunda (discussed in May’s profile, as well), is a sustainability themed dorm, so it makes sense to discuss what sustainability means among those who will be living in this house and interacting with those living in this house. The House 2 lounge is filled with magazines and other resources related to living a more sustainable lifestyle, and the RAs in this house this year are active members of Path to a Greener Stevenson (PTAGS), an environmental group that meets in this house’s lounge on Thursdays from 8-9 PM. While students with a particular inclination toward sustainability can choose to live in this house, it’s important that students in all of the dorms be exposed to the issues, practices, and reasons surrounding sustainability. Not to mention it is great to have these conversations going on in classes in which leaders are learning how to lead by example and talk with residents about important life topics.

“Students form habits early in college,” Cohen remarked. She said that it’s important to talk about sustainable habits with the RAs who will be there with incoming freshman at the beginning of their college career and who can help influence good decision-making. A student’s first year can be defining in what kinds of habits follow them throughout their lives. For many, it’s the first time they’re independent from their families and making decisions without their parents checking on them.

If you haven't seen The Story of Stuff, take 20 minutes and watch it right now (or at least send yourself a reminder to watch it after work or class). This short film was the homework assignment due the day that the RA class talked about sustainable topics. It’s a “a 20-minute animation” that focuses on “the consumerist society" and “the way we make, use and throw away Stuff” (1). Cohen said the discussion went well that day in class when these issues were brought up and that it was exciting to talk about these issues with RAs who will be able to continue these conversations with their residents next year. During the class, they spent some time "thinking about where all of the stuff in a freshman dorm would come from and how to help students think about those things during move in and move out," she described.

These conversations generated tangible ways for RAs to encourage sustainable behavior in their houses next year. Some examples were reminding residents to turn off lights, creating a box in the lounge to hold old fliers to be used as scratch paper, and posting reminders in the bathrooms about reducing water use.

The class also did an activity during which students became more aware of their own environmental impact and resource use in their everyday routines. "You wake up and use your alarm, which uses electricity," Cohen gave as an example. "You take a shower, which uses water and energy to warm the water... In the dining hall, where does that food come from? Your daily routine impacts the world around you."


What are some ways that students in the dorms can be more conscious of their impact and take steps to reduce it? Post your ideas in the comments!

Sarah Cohen previously worked with the Sustainability Office’s Green Office Certification program, and she is currently working on The Sustainability Awareness Promotional Video about campus sustainability to share with incoming freshman and the UCSC campus. She is a third year studying Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES), an Intensive BA Degree in Sociology.

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Bibliography
1. The Story of Stuff website.

Too Many P’s? Personal, Political, Publics and Potatoes

April 5, 2012
2:00-5:00 PM
Oakes Mural Room

Join us for a spirited conversation about the politics of food and kinship—amongst other world-changing matters. At this Science & Justice Working Group event, Ruth Ozeki will read from her novel, All Over Creation, joined at the table by Nancy Chen (Anthropology), Julie Guthman Community Studies) and Steve Gliessman (Environmental Studies). Joan Haran (Cesagen at Cardiff University) will host this feast of ideas.

There is a place set for you at the table, so please come along. We will talk about public engagement with agricultural technology, genetic modification of crops, non-violent direct action and the creative use of generative metaphors. We will tease out some relationships between genes, gender and genre along the way, and consider how fiction can help us reimagine and reconfigure food systems.

RUTH OZEKI is a filmmaker, novelist, and novice Zen Buddhist priest. Her award-winning novels, My Year of Meats and All Over Creation, both New York Times Notable Books, have garnered international critical acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, environmental politics and global popular culture into unique hybrid narrative forms. Ruth worked in commercial television and media production, including low budget horror, for over a decade, and her independent films have shown at Sundance and on PBS. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of anthologies, magazines and newspapers, and she has taught and lectured at universities and colleges around the world. A long-time meditator, Ruth was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest in 2010. She and her husband, environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer, divide their time between New York and Cortes Island, B.C.. Her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2013. Her website is www.ruthozeki.com.

This event is Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Environmental Studies, the Food Systems Working Group, and Measure 43.